


500 tonnes of pure hard granite

by cisphobickarkat



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fluff, Humanstuck, M/M, Marriage Proposal, lil angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27413857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cisphobickarkat/pseuds/cisphobickarkat
Summary: You swallow thickly, watching Karkat pick at a loose thread at the end of his sleeve. “Are you asking me to marry you?” He doesn’t look up.“I- ” you start, and cut yourself off. Youare, is the thing. “Yeah. I am, yeah.”
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 19
Kudos: 338





	500 tonnes of pure hard granite

**Author's Note:**

> https://youtu.be/n1h1AOeVQ38

You’re laying in bed, hands under your head, studying the textured finish of the ceiling. Your room is painted a bland, beige sort of color but your ceiling is stark white. You study the paint, the bumps and imperfections in the texture, looking for shapes or pictures as you try not to think about the dread that’s taken home in the pit of your stomach.

You’re thinking about the future again.

You feel, a little bit, like you might be sick.

Karkat’s sitting on the floor next to the bed. He’s cross-legged, bundled up in a soft sweatshirt he’d stolen from you, so big on him he’d needed to roll the sleeves up. Every so often, he curses quietly to himself. He’s filling out college applications. It makes your chest constrict so tightly that for a second, you can’t breathe.

You aren’t going to college. You’ve been on the fence about it for months, since the very end of junior year, but you’re certain now. Last night you’d finally stopped kidding yourself and admitted, to the darkness of your room, that you aren’t going to college.

You haven’t told him yet. Karkat already knows exactly what he wants to do after high school. He’s gonna major in English. He’s gonna be a novelist.

You don’t know what it means for your future, as a couple. You don’t even know if you _have_ a future, is the thing, and thinking about it, staring up at the ceiling, is making you pretty fucking sick.

Obviously, you’d both known it was coming. As high school students, it’s inevitable that one day you wouldn’t be in high school anymore. You just don’t really talk about it, and you usually do your best not to think about it, but it’s looming now, it’s so close, and you can’t get it off your mind despite your best attempts.

Because the end of the school year might be the end of the two of you, of Dave and Karkat. You’ll have the summer together, at least, but then what? Karkat’s applying to schools across the country, ready to get the hell out of dodge. Not that you can blame him- you aren’t going to school, but you’re leaving, too. You wanna move to Los Angeles. You wanna actually try and make a name for yourself as a DJ. You just don’t know what that means for you and Karkat.

You don’t know if Karkat will wanna move across the country with you. You don’t even really know if Karkat’s gonna wanna stay with you at all. You talk about forever, you talk about your future together, but what if it’s all just talk? You’re still kids, at the core of it. You’ve been together almost five years, but you’re still only eighteen. What if Karkat wants a fresh start after high school? What if five years is your expiry date?

You swallow thickly. “I’m not going to college,” you tell the ceiling.

From your peripheral, you can see Karkat startle, looking up at you from the floor. “Oh,” he says.

You don’t look at him. “I’m moving to L.A.”

“Oh,” he repeats. This time, he sounds a little bit like the wind’s been knocked out of him. You don’t know what to say, so you don’t say anything. Silence lapses between the two of you for just a moment. “That’s far.”

Karkat lives in the same neighborhood as you, coincidentally. He moved in a few houses away from you the summer after middle school, just after you’d started dating, just after you figured out that the weird, warm way Karkat always made you feel wasn’t remotely platonic. Karkat’s been within arms reach of you for years. “As far from Houston as I can get.”

You can feel Karkat looking at you, but he doesn’t say anything. You don’t either, for a minute, but the silence is so tense now it only worsens the weight of unease that’s sitting in your chest. “I have an apartment lined up,” you continue, still looking at the ceiling. “It’s shitty but it’s cheap.”

“Oh,” Karkat says. He doesn’t say anything else.

The silence is starting to make your skin crawl, so you add, “and I have a job waiting for me. Two of ‘em, actually. Which is shit, y’know, but it’ll pay the rent.”

Karkat’s quiet, so you finally turn your head, propping yourself up on your elbow to look at him. He’s looking away, applications forgotten as he stares down into his lap. “How,” you start, and clear your throat. “How do you feel about that?”

Karkat lifts his head slowly. He looks crestfallen, and it makes your heart sink. “Not great,” he says, and he doesn’t sound like he’s crying but he sounds like he might be on his way there. “This is the first responsible thing you’ve ever done and you’re only doing it to get the hell away from me.”

“I’ve been responsible before,” you protest. You aren’t sure why that’s what you say.

It must catch Karkat off guard, too, because he suddenly looks less like he might cry. His eyebrows draw together in the middle. “Wha- no you fucking _haven’t_ , Dave.”

“Fuck you, dude,” you say. “I have.”

“When?” Karkat asks. “Name one time you’ve ever been responsible.”

“I’ve been responsible plenty of times,” you insist.

“You can’t think of a specific example because you’ve never fucking been responsible,” he says. “This is the first time. Fuck you, asshole.”

“For being responsible?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Karkat asks. “For leaving! You just told me you didn’t know what you wanted to do after graduation and now you have a fucking apartment in L.A.?”

“I want you to come with me,” you say. You say it quickly, hurrying to get the words out before you lose your nerve. You don’t really know what Karkat wants after high school, at the core of it. You don’t know what he wants his life to look like or if he wants you to be in it. But you know what you want, and what you want is Karkat. It’s always been Karkat.

Karkat, who looks a little bit like he might be in shock. “What?”

“I want you to move to L.A. with me,” you repeat. “I’m like, sure there’s some good schools out there. And I know you wanna get outta here too. You can’t get any farther than California.”

“Oh,” he says. He sounds winded.

“And I want,” you start, and your voice cracks embarrassingly. Your heart is beating so hard against the inside of your rib cage that you think you can hear it. “I wanna marry you,” you say. “I really like it and I wanna put a ring on it. I wanna start a life with you in L.A. and I wanna do it as your fucking husband, Kat.”

Karkat’s quiet for a long time. He looks away, at the college applications he has strewn around him, and you watch him, unsure of what else to say. This is the part you were afraid of- not of Karkat not wanting to be with you, really, but of you both wanting different things. You’d try the long distance thing, sure, but you can’t imagine it’d take much time before Karkat met somebody at school, somebody better looking and smarter and with a better future than you.

You swallow thickly, watching Karkat pick at a loose thread at the end of his sleeve. “Are you asking me to marry you?” He doesn’t look up.

“I- ” you start, and cut yourself off. You _are_ , is the thing. “Yeah. I am, yeah.”

Karkat finally lifts his head. “This is kind of a shitty proposal.”

“Fuck you,” you say immediately, but some of the crushing weight of dread lifts off of you. “I did everything right.”

“You didn’t even get me a ring,” Karkat says.

“Oh, dude,” you say, and you climb from the bed, walking around Karkat to the desk pushed up against the far wall. Your backpack is sitting in the chair, and you unzip it to rifle through gum wrappers and loose leaf. It takes you a minute to find the ring, but after a second, you do- a thin, sort of plain silver band.

You sit on the floor in front of Karkat, and you don’t have time to say anything else before he breathes, “ _holy shit, you have a ring._ ”

Your grin is sheepish. “It’s like, a Strider-Lalonde family heirloom or something,” you say. “I’ve had it for a few weeks.”

“A few weeks,” he repeats.

It isn’t a question, but you nod. “I wasn’t- I dunno. It’s a long story, kinda.”

Karkat raises his eyebrows. “I’m not going anywhere.”

You huff softly, pushing your shades up your nose. “It’s just- you’ve been doing a lot of this, y’know?” you say, gesturing vaguely to the college applications between you. “You’ve been, like, reading about colleges and filling out applications and applying for scholarships and all this other shit. And it’s made me think a lot about the future and that’s- it scares the shit outta me. Because I know we’ve, like, talked about getting married and what we’re gonna do when we’re old but that’s- it- it’s _real_ now, y’know?”

“What?” Karkat asks.

You wave a hand uselessly between the two of you. “You’re going to fucking college, man, but what about me? D’you know what I mean? We haven’t really talked about what we’re gonna do after graduation. We haven’t really needed to, I guess, but now you’re applying for schools and it’s got me thinking that we’re fucking graduating at the end of this year. And I finally know what I want after I graduate, but it’s got me thinking that I don’t really know what you want. Like, I know you wanna study literature, but what else do you want? Do you want me to come along and shack up with you? Or do you wanna be single when you start school? Maybe you wanna be a little more sexually adventurous than you got to be in high school ‘cause you had a shitty boyfriend the whole time, I dunno.”

Karkat makes a face, opening his mouth, so you continue, “that’s rhetorical. Anyway, I was crying to my aunt Roxy about it a few weeks ago, and she kinda let me cry it out but hearing myself say it out loud, I sound like an idiot. But anyway, she kinda says ‘what do _you_ want, Davey,’ and, like.”

You take a deep breath. “I wanna be a DJ. You’re always telling me I’m onto something with my music and I’ve wanted to do it for so long I might as fucking well, y’know? And I wanna move as far away from Texas as I can get. And I wanna move somewhere chill, somewhere with less white people, somewhere the weather’s better, so L.A.

“And I want my baby,” you say, reaching out to put a hand on Karkat’s knee. “Y’know? I wanna come home to you, I wanna wake up next to you, I don’t wanna hold any other hand for the rest of my life. And like, she laughed at me,” you conclude. “But she gave me this. Not to, like, get me to propose, but so I had it when I was ready, y’know? I think she was thinking a couple years down the line. I don’t think she thought it would be a couple weeks after she gave me the fucking thing but like, I didn’t, either, so there’s that. It just seemed like a good time, y’know? With the L.A. thing. And I want- I wanna marry you as soon as you’ll let me. I really wanna marry you before L.A., just ‘cause I really want to start my life there with you as my husband, but I’ll wait if you wanna wait. Or, you can say no, obviously. You don’t have to.”

Karkat’s quiet for a heartbeat. “That’s it?”

“What?” you ask. “I just said a whole bunch of shit.”

“You didn’t even ask,” Karkat says. “You’re waiting for an answer and you didn’t even fucking ask me, dick.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? I just asked you!”

“No,” Karkat deadpans, “you didn’t. You told me a whole story about why you’re proposing to me but you didn’t fucking ask. And part of your story was you thinking I was gonna break up with you ‘cause I wanted my college years to be slutty or something. Who says shit like that during a proposal, Strider?”

“I’d understand if you wanted that,” you say.

“Why would I want that?”

“You don’t?”

“ _No_ , Dave!”

You hold up the ring. “You wanna marry me?”

Just like that, Karkat breaks into a big smile that nearly knocks him over. “Of course I wanna marry you, asshole.”

You grin so widely it makes something in your jaw ache. “Really?”

Karkat laughs, and takes your face in his hands to kiss your stupid smile right off it. “Yeah,” he says.

“And you’ll come to L.A. with me?”

“I’d go with you anywhere,” he answers easily, and the feeling in your chest is so overwhelmingly pleasant that you almost can’t believe you ever thought it was dread. “I don’t think I have any schools from California on my list, though, so I’m gonna have to start from fucking scratch. Fuck you for that.”

“Sorry,” you say, but you aren’t, because Karkat’s coming with you and that’s the only thing that matters. “I love you. You’re the love of my life, man.”

“I love you so much,” Karkat tells you, and then kisses you again. He only pulls back to say, “now put my fucking ring on, you dick.”

You kiss him again as you slide the ring onto his finger, and it’s easily the best moment of your entire fucking life.


End file.
